Featured entries from our Journal

Details Are Part of Our Difference

Embracing the Evidence at Anheuser-Busch – Mid 1980s

529 Best Practices

David Booth on How to Choose an Advisor

The One Minute Audio Clip You Need to Hear

Tag: Mac McQuown

A Legend Passes

 

The investing world recently lost one of its quiet pioneers, Mac McQuown. While his name may not be widely recognized outside our industry, his influence runs deep. A trailblazer in modern investing, Mac’s visionary contributions laid the groundwork for the strategies many investors benefit from today. As David Booth, Co-Founder of Dimensional Fund Advisors, aptly noted, Mac was a true transformer in the field. [Click the quote to read Dimensional’s tribute.]

To bring about fundamental change, you need great thinkers and researchers, but you also need implementers. People like Mac don’t win Nobel Prizes; they implement the ideas of the guys who do. He’s a catalyst.

“Catalyst” is the keyword. There are so many useful nuggets in the attached article in the Financial Times that you’ll be better off reading it. In a short space, you will learn the history of evidence-based investing, the first index fund (Mac’s creation), the birth of many future Nobel Laureates, and their impressive connection to Dimensional, Blackrock, and other global finance leaders.

If you want to know and understand the recipe you’re investing in when investing with Hill, this is one of the better shortcuts to taking the long view you’ll ever read.

Built the Index Fund and Kept Going

Who invented the index fund? Most investors would guess it was Vanguard founder John Bogle. Bogle did launch the first publicly available index fund in 1976. After being derided as “Bogle’s folly,” it went on to become today’s Vanguard 500 Index Fund, a name nearly synonymous with indexing.

So it may come as a surprise to learn that Bogle did not actually invent the index fund. That credit goes to three gentlemen who created the first institutional index funds in the early 1970s: Dimensional Fund Advisor board member John “Mac” McQuown, co-founder and Executive Chairman David Booth, and co-founder Rex Sinquefield.

 

 

In this brief video, Booth reflects on the evolution of indexing and evidence-based investing, which led to Dimensional’s own value-added approach. “The basic idea of indexing has been an overwhelming success,” says Booth, but “Dimensional built the firm on the idea that we could do better.”

Mac McQuown — A Living Legend

Mac McQuown

John “Mac” McQuown’s first claim to fame was creating one of the original S&P 500 index funds in the early 1970s. In an advisor-only video interview he conducted with David Booth about his work in evidence-based investing, Mac says:

“What I knew then, and I know now, is that this set of ideas is compelling. And sooner or later the world is going to come around to seeing the validity of this form of investing.”

He continues his work to this day and even holds a seat on Dimensional’s board of directors. He was recently labeled by Bloomberg magazine as the “80-year-old whiz kid” for his work reinventing the corporate bond. Watch the video below for more.

Featured entries from our Journal

Details Are Part of Our Difference

Embracing the Evidence at Anheuser-Busch – Mid 1980s

529 Best Practices

David Booth on How to Choose an Advisor

The One Minute Audio Clip You Need to Hear

Hill Investment Group